Royal St. George's Perfect for Open

You never fall out of love with your first girlfriend, not completely, and so it is with your first links course. She — do you remember when golfers, like Foreign Service offices speaking of far-away countries, gave courses the feminine pronoun treatment? — becomes part of you, part of your golfing education.

Royal St. George's, on a long stretch of linksland on the mellow Kentish coast, is a great, tough, gnarly, mean and unfair golf course. You wouldn't want a British Open played on any other sort of course, would you? St. Andrews, Troon, Royal Lytham: they're all pretty much the same way. It's been fair game to the diss Royal St. George's for years all because of one comment Jack Nicklaus can't even remember saying anymore. The Bear was once asked about his...

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